This is an OS which has everything. It’s clean, it’s simple, it has a helpful community, stable code, and even pretty good package counts to support nearly any desktop/workstation activity.
And yet, I feel like there are nagging issues which ultimately affect all non-mainstream1 OSes. Display driver complications, janky system upgrades, a lack of groupware clients. I’m not picking on OpenBSD, I love the distro and I think it should succeed in this particular area (the desktop/workstation) where other open source alternatives have failed, but why hasn’t anybody managed to make it happen yet?
For a while, there was a similar hope around DragonflyBSD in the FreeBSD community, but I don’t know where that ended up… I do know I see nobody really using it.
What’s it going to take?
1Obviously, I mean MacOS and Windows, since Linux is at least as hampered on the desktop, perhaps moreso on account of the poor community and scattered vision.
I recently used it as a desktop for over a decade.
But at some point, I found that more and more of my family’s needs had to be handled on an iPad Pro with keyboard, or iPhone. But I always thought it was cool that I was still “technically” using output from the OpenBSD project since my iOS ran pf and LibreSSL and other stuff developed by the OpenBSD devs.
At some point, I got tired of Apple, switched to Android, and then brought my computers over to Linux. It’s better integrated than what I had going on before with things like Dropbox and Proton Mail and Spotify and Signal and my bluetooth trackball working natively.
So while I had been using OpenBSD and enjoying its simplicity (nothing beats a custom cwm and a couple of xterm sessions with terminus), it was not meeting my needs.
At this point, I would need at least Signal to work, and a working dropbox client, to consider going back. And even then it would be limiting as I would still be doing a majority of things in a Chrome browser.
You bring up another good point that I haven’t considered - signal! Man, why isn’t there a signal client? I almost want to make this a side project now.